Dr. Mignot has worked both as a medical doctor and as a researcher in sleep and neurosciences
since moving permanently to the United States in 1989. Most notably, he discovered that human
narcolepsy is caused by the autoimmune loss of ~20,000 hypothalamic neurons secreting the wakepromoting
peptide hypocretin. He identified HLA-DQB1*06:02 and T-Cell receptor genes as
major susceptibility genes across ethnic groups, which act together to promote a highly selective
T cell mediated autoimmune process triggered by influenza infection. He has received numerous
awards including a Breakthrough Prize and is a member of the National Academies of Sciences
and Medicine. He works on many aspects of sleep research and on unravelling the etiologies of
various autoimmune diseases affecting the brain. Current studies in his laboratory are expending
on these findings and range from clinical/patient oriented (better diagnosis and therapy,
epidemiology) to basic (positional cloning, GWAS, proteomics, immunology, physiology,
neurosciences, pharmacology) studies in sleep and neurological disorders. In addition to his
research, he works with a team of engineers and students, developing at scale machine learning
for automatic analysis of thousands of polysomnographic (PSG) “sleep” recordings which is being
applied to a sample of 200,000 sleep studies with the goal of using sleep as a predictor of
cardiovascular, neurological, and psychiatric diseases. He particularly enjoys working in such a
culturally diverse environment as his lab is very international where diversity is celebrated in many
ways to instill a sense of belonging for everyone.